Initial CD Cover Ideas

Blighters is a Indie-New Wave band so I felt that I would aim for more of an alternative artistic design similar to that of There for Tomorrow’s ‘Pages’ album or the Fast Forward: Indie Trax cover. Knowing that my creative skills aren’t that impressive I wanted to keep to a simple design, thinking of this put me into the mind of New Wave being similar to graffiti and sent me on a hunt through my album collection for inspiration.

I then came across an album cover by Open Chapter called ‘falling to be held’. This cover has the simplicity yet interest I was looking for. The horizon affect, or rays of light, also suited my idea extremely well because of the relation to the New Wave genre with it being related to a New Dawn, or rising sun.

With these initial thoughts I then decided to have a go at using Adobe Illustrator. The first image I created was this high contrast design. I liked the strict differences in colour however after further fiddling I found the affect used called 'Trace' was very limiting in it's affects and created a huge loss in the detail of the image.

Not letting this deter me I spent a bit more time on the image and in the end found that the limits of detail was very annoying. Looking further from that the first outcome had a completely off colour scheme for the genre. Suiting a more grungy band than indie. The second outcome wasn't anymore effective.

I felt that the outcome was to cheesy to be an Album Cover. While the contrast was good the amount of detail lost even when multiple character layers was used was to immense to be an effective path. But I felt i should at least attempt to use the horizon affect I had liked the look of and a few of the outcomes can be seen below.

The horizon affect created quite strong images, however they had lost my desired affect and had no obviously location to host the name of the album or band name. Even though using the speakers seemed a good idea in my initial attempts the text was far to small in comparison to the album cover.

So I decided to go back to the drawing board and to select a different album cover image. I went through my original selection of images from [ THIS ] post. Knowing that I had hit something good with the 'Rays of light' / Horizon affect I decide to push forward using a stronger single image.

To see my thought process and the CD Covers Design stage look [ HERE ] and for the finished products [ HERE ].